Patrons at a food and/or beverage dining establishment may often be burdened with several responsibilities that may interfere with the social and/or epicurean aspect of their dining experience. For example, patrons may often have to wait to be seated by a waiter, to be hand then menus, to order food and/or beverage items, to receive final checks, and/or to submit final payments. Patrons may often be burdened with the task of calculating final payments and added tip, gratuity, and/or service fee costs. Towards the end of a dining experience, the calculation of payments owed by individual patrons among a group of patrons may present a particularly burdensome task that may interfere with the social experience of dining. There is a desire for a system and method that may automatically calculate the payments owed by each patron and decrease the social awkwardness involved with determining each patron owes.
Similarly, waiters at a food and/or beverage dining establishment may be burdened with myriad tasks that consume their time, attention, and efficiency, and/or which negatively impact the bottom line revenue and cost for the dining establishment. These tasks may include, but are not limited to, seating patrons, delivering menus, taking orders, communicating orders to the kitchen staff, picking up completed food and/or beverage items from the kitchen staff, having an organized system to coordinate the various ordered food and/or beverage items to the patrons that ordered them, delivering completed food and/or beverage items to the patrons, keeping track of the bills accrued for each patron and/or group of patrons, submitting the final check to the patrons, receiving payment from the patrons, and/or otherwise attending to the needs of patrons and/or kitchen staff.
Likewise, the kitchen staff at a food and/or beverage dining establishment are also faced with the burdensome tasks of receiving the orders to prepare, cook, and/or create the ordered food and/or beverage items, including orders regarding prioritization of the food and/or beverage orders, and communicating to the waiter regarding completed food and/or beverage items or issues related to the preparation of the food and/or beverage items.
Thus, there is a desire for a system and method for facilitating communication between the patrons, waiters, and kitchen staff, and alleviating the above burdensome tasks from the patrons, waiter, and kitchen staff. There is also a desire for a personalized dining management system that may automatically keep account of the food and/or beverage items ordered by patrons and the bills accrued as a result of the orders, and that may deliver final checks to the patrons and enable the payment thereof. Furthermore, there is a desire for a personalized dining system that may automatically keep track of the accumulation of costs incurred by each individual patron of a group of patrons and which may enable each patron to pay his or her share for the dining experience.